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International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, 2nd edition
International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, 2nd edition
VOLUME
7
RABIN, YITZHAK–SOCIOLOGY, MICRO-
William A. Darity Jr.
EDITOR IN CHIEF
R
RABIN, YITZHAK
1922–1995
At a time when Israel’s global economic and political
prominence was on the rise, the nation’s prime minister,
Yitzhak Rabin, was tragically gunned down. The three
shots fired into Rabin’s back on the night of November 4,
1995, also pierced through a newly emerging Israel. As
Israel began to forge significant political bonds with its
Arab neighbors after years of territorial conflict, an Israeli
law student, Yigal Amir, assassinated Rabin out of religious conviction. Rabin’s premature death left questions
as to whether or not his objectives for a peaceful, economically strong Israel would be fully realized. This article discusses Rabin’s political and societal contributions to Israel,
his relationship with Palestine, and the impact of his
untimely death on Israeli politics and its relations with
Palestine.
During Rabin’s early years, Israel struggled for
national independence. Rabin was born in Jerusalem on
March 1, 1922. A little over twenty years later, Rabin
fought in the 1948 War of Independence, from which the
Jewish population in Palestine could claim Israel as an
official state. In 1968, Israel successfully fought against
Egypt, Syria, and Jordan during the Six Day War, in
which it gained control of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai
Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
Not long after, Rabin entered politics with minimal
political experience. In 1974, the incumbent prime minister, Golda Meir of the Israeli Labor Party, stepped down
after vociferous public calls for her resignation after Israel’s
failure in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Israel suffered a
large number of casualties and the loss of limited territory
in the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and Syria during this war.
Since Rabin was free from blame, he won the election for
prime minister and took the oath of office on June 3,
1974. He faced numerous challenges as a political leader
during a tumultuous time in Middle East history.
As prime minister from 1974 to 1977, Rabin contributed greatly to Israel in both the domestic and international arenas. He strategically forged a closer
relationship with the White House and the U.S. State
Department, a process that began during his tenure as
Israeli Ambassador to the United States. This relationship
was made evident when Richard Nixon became the first
U.S. president to visit Israel. The visit was also a way for
Nixon to resurrect his falling public stature during the
Watergate trials, according to Rabin’s memoirs. This bond
became significant as Rabin sought and garnered U.S.
support for arms sales to Israel. Rabin also succeeded in
finalizing a 1975 interim agreement with Egypt, in which
Israel agreed to pull back from the Sinai Peninsula.
Rabin exhibited more skill in his second term as
prime minister, from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.
Israel and Palestine remained in conflict over the establishment of Israel as a separate state. Yet Rabin and Yasser
Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO), signed the Declaration of Principles
(DOP), which aimed to terminate Israel’s occupation of
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Jewish and Arab
leaders later signed the Oslo II agreement, in which Israel
agreed to withdraw from seven West Bank towns and the
Palestinians agreed to hold elections. The historically significant cooperation between the two leaders created
opportunities for political and economic ties with the rest
of the Middle East and nonregional states.
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Race
The Arab-Israeli tensions resulted in divisions within
Israel itself. Rabin sought to resolve Israel’s conflicts with
its Arab neighbors, especially Palestine, through political
negotiation. However, some Jewish citizens such as Amir
felt betrayed by the Oslo II accords. Amir saw the agreement as handing over land given to the Jews by God to
Palestine. He felt that what he perceived as betrayal could
only be rectified through murdering Rabin.
A focus on the free market contributed to Israel’s economic growth. Israel’s economic policy shifted away from
socialist ideology towards a liberal economic policy, and in
the early 1990s Israel experienced an annual growth rate
of over 5.5 percent. At the same time, unemployment
dropped below 7 percent. Israel’s economic stability
attracted more foreign investment.
Ultimately, Rabin’s premature death had a long-lasting effect on Israel’s relationship with the rest of the
Middle East. Many years later, Israel still struggles with
questions of its identity, democratic order, the future of
occupied territories, and the chance for peace with
Palestine.
Arab-Israeli War of 1967; Arafat, Yasir; Meir,
Golda; Nobel Peace Prize
SEE ALSO
skinned) groups began in the form of chattel slavery and
other abuses of humanity, those in power began turning to
science as a way to rationalize the oppressive conditions to
which these groups were consigned. The rush to develop
these pseudoscientific claims might have been spawned in
part by the need of the colonizers to assuage their guilt
and to resolve the cognitive dissonance and contradictions
evident in rising new societies that prided themselves on
freedom and democracy even as they relegated certain
groups in their societies to a nonfree, even subhuman status (Horsman 1997). While the “science” that developed
the idea of race is certainly discredited by today’s standards, the social ramifications of humans having separated
themselves into races still remain firmly intact. As the
Thomas theorem once stated, “when men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas
and Thomas 1928, p. 572). Thus, although the idea of
race as a classification system of human beings is what
social scientists call socially constructed rather than biologically based, it still is an enduring category of social
analysis. It is so not because of its genetic or biological
basis, but because of the power it has wielded as an idea to
create dividing lines between different classes of human
beings across the globe (Graves 2004).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BEFORE RACE
Horovitz, David. 1996. Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of
Yitzhak Rabin. New York: New Market Press.
Kurzman, Dan. 1998. Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin.
New York: HarperCollins.
Peri, Yoram, ed. 2000. The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rabin, Yitzhak. 1979. The Rabin Memoirs. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Prior to the eighteenth century, human beings were recognizing differences between themselves as they crossed
national and continental borders in exploration and trade.
Sometimes these differences would be reflected upon positively and at others, negatively, especially when groups
clashed over territory and power. For example, there are
Biblical writings where African kingdoms and Jewish
kingdoms are regarded as allies of generally equal worth
and status. And in Greek and Roman periods, these two
societies expressed a great respect for the learning they
gleaned from African cultural developments. Even as
occasional negative images of blackness (associated with
sin, devil, and non-Christianity) were expressed, “these
views were never developed into a broad color consciousness viewing Africans as a greatly inferior species” (Feagin
2000, p. 71). Thus, although human beings reflected
upon their own differences as they made contact with
each other throughout time, there was generally a mix of
negative and positive imagery, and prior to the idea of
race, no discussion of an altogether inferior or superior
species attached to physical differences yet existed.
From the 1400s to the 1600s, as colonization and
enslavement expanded, the Spanish and other Europeans
began to use consistently negative language to describe the
African human beings they enslaved. This pattern was
coupled with positive evaluations of their own group.
However, these evaluations still did not amount to explic-
Sarita D. Jackson
RACE
The concept of race as a categorization system for human
beings did not exist formally until the late eighteenth century. Most analysts (e.g., Feagin and Feagin 1999; Allen
1994; Roediger 1991; Omi and Winant 1994) have
linked the inception of the biologically based idea of distinct races of human beings to European colonization of
the New World. Although prior to this time human
beings certainly distinguished between themselves in
many ways, these distinctions tended to be based upon
tribal, clan, ethnic, or national differences that stemmed
from place of residence/territory or shared belief systems
rather than on innate, genetic characteristics. However, as
capitalist-based exploitation of certain (often darker-
2
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itly racial designations. The Europeans’ negative assessments of Africans at this point were rooted in cultural and
religious differences rather than in any biological,
unchanging facts of their physical chemistry. For instance,
Europeans described themselves as rational and civilized
while they described Africans as uncivilized and uncontrolled. Further, the Africans not being Christian resulted
in Europeans characterizing them as “heathens,” and later
in North America, European settlers used the same line of
thinking toward the Native Americans (Feagin 2000;
Takaki 1993). In fact, in the 1600s, a European named
François Bernier (1625–1688) even developed a hierarchy
of groups ranking them from the most primitive and civilized to the least, placing Europeans at the top and
Africans at the bottom (Feagin and Feagin 1999).
However ethnocentric and biased these claims were,
they were based upon the assumption that these were cultural differences emanating from shared, learned beliefs
rather than body composition or other unchangeable biological inheritances. Indeed, in the case of the Native
Americans, for a brief time, the colonists in power considered the possibility that Native Americans could be civilized and thus considered equal by converting them to
Christianity (Takaki 1993). These positions acknowledging a common human capacity for acquiring knowledge
across all skin color gradations (even as it was perceived as
underutilized or underdeveloped for some) still ran
counter to later notions of biologically grounded races.
The language of race as a pseudobiological category
of humans emerged first in the 1770s with the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). As noted by
Emmanuel C. Eze in his 1997 publication, Kant’s categorization hierarchy for “races of mankind” was laid out as
follows:
RACE AS IDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL
RELATIONSHIP
Blumenbach was the one who coined the term
Caucasian simply because he felt the Europeans he
observed in the Caucasus mountains were the most beautiful, and he erroneously concluded that the first human
remains were found there (Gould 1994). Yet the power of
this pseudoscience remains in contemporary consciousness, as some modern-day Americans who view themselves as white, for example, refer to themselves as
Caucasian, even when their genealogy hails from nowhere
near the Caucasus mountains from which this category
got its name. It is work like this that laid the groundwork
for the centuries that followed, with human beings across
the globe viewing themselves as members of distinct racial
groups. These groupings were never just nominal categories; they were always hierarchically arranged and structured by dominance (Hall 1980).
An important point to note about these racial categories is that they did not just come to have meaning simply because a couple of scholars penned these
categorizations systems and they attained popularity. They
were reified because racialized social systems were structured around them. That is, the social relations of the day
mirrored the order that the categories suggested. They
would not have acquired such powerful social meaning
Several scholars have identified the conception of human
races as a key part of the development of a racist ideology
(e.g., Feagin 2000; Yetman 2004). An ideology is a belief
system intended to rationalize and justify existing social
arrangements. In this way the concept of race is a decisively social concept because it is not observed as existing
independent of the “racialized social systems” (BonillaSilva 1997) that hold it in place. Feagin identifies three
dynamics that crystallized by the late 1700s to result in a
clearly racist (as opposed to nationalist or cultural) ideology: “(1) an accent on physically and biologically distinctive categories called ‘races’; (2) an emphasis on ‘race’ as
the primary determinant of a group’s essential personality
and cultural traits; and (3) a hierarchy of superior and
inferior racial groups” (Feagin 2000, p. 79). Thus, at this
point in history, no longer are human differences attributed first and foremost to national, regional, and cultural
variations. Instead, they become perceived in a biologically determined (static, unchanging) way, and the differences begin to be encoded into hierarchical categorization
schemas that connote superior and inferior species of
human beings.
Stem genus, white brunette;
First race, very blond (northern Europe), of damp
cold;
Second race, copper-red (America), of dry cold;
Third race, black (Senegambia), of dry heat;
Fourth race, olive-yellow (Indians), of dry heat.
Roughly two decades later, another German scholar
(of human anatomy) named Johann Blumenbach
(1752–1840) ventured into similar territory of racial hierarchies founded on what he viewed as biological premises.
Ivan Hannaford noted in his 1996 work that
Blumenbach’s categories were conceptualized in the following order (top to bottom; superior to inferior):
Caucasians (Europeans)
Mongolians (Asians)
Ethiopians (Africans)
Americans (Native Americans)
Malays (Polynesians)
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without the systems that held them in place. Thus, one
way to conceptualize race is a way of relating within a particular racial social system. Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the meaning of any particular race changes
over time and is culturally specific. A single individual
could be deemed one race in one society but move or
travel to a different society (or even between states in the
same society, as in the case of the United States) and be
categorized as a different race. Its basis for meaning resides
in a particular society’s racialized social system and not
within an individual body. Some social scientists use the
term reification to describe this process of turning a social
relationship into a thing in and of itself. As noted by
Margaret Radin, once reified, race “acquires a ‘phantom
objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational
and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (Harris 1998,
p. 107).
USING BLOOD TO DETERMINE
RACE
Although the social distinction of a race of human beings
was often based upon physical characteristics, the question of which physical characteristics were used to determine race and in what proportion has varied greatly across
cultures and across time. These distinctions are usually set
by those in power for a distinctly political purpose. For
example, in the United States, the so-called “one-drop
rule” predominated for all of the nineteenth and well into
the twentieth century. This rule stated that an individual
having even a distant ancestor who was categorized as
black (conceived as one drop of black blood) also made
that individual black as well. It is important to note that
this determination was not, of course, made from blood
testing but rather from knowledge of the individual’s family tree and the racial categorizations (socially) attached to
each member. This rule served the political purpose of
limiting the numbers of persons who could cross the racial
dividing line to become white and enjoy all the perquisites
and privileges thereof. In the United States, chattel slavery
was officially permitted and governmentally sanctioned
until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865. However,
shortly into the nineteenth century, no further importation of slaves from overseas was permitted under the
Constitution. Thus, it was convenient for the white patriarchal powers of the country that any offspring resulting
from the sexual exploitation of their black female slaves
(even though these children were also half white) would
still be considered their own property and not eligible for
freedom (Graves 2004). However, even after slavery was
abolished, individuals who were defined as black by the
one drop rule had severely curtailed rights, and many lived
in a status that was similar to slavery except in name, due
4
to sharecropping, the convict lease system, and white terrorism holding all of this in place.
According to court records, in order to escape this
awful fate, many individuals attempted to remove their
black racial categorizations by way of the law. What fraction of black blood was needed in order to categorize one
as black? In Louisiana, for example, it was one-32nd of
“black blood” that made someone into “black.” The U.S.
Census identified the racial categories of Negro, Mulatto
(one-half black blood), Quadroon (one-fourth black
blood) and Octoroon (one-eighth black blood) as late as
1890 (Lee 1993). When individuals were not able to
attain legal freedom from blackness but were somewhat
light-skinned, they sometimes participated in passing by
portraying themselves as white. It is notable that such
passing activities almost always occur when someone categorized as an “inferior” race attempts to pass as a member of the “superior” race and not the other way around.
This indicates how race is explicitly hierarchical and
designed to keep dividing lines between who does and
who does not receive the full rights and privileges of citizenship in any given society.
In the contemporary context in the United States, the
pseudoscientific notion of a blood quantum (one-fourth)
has to be proven in order for citizens to be able to racially
categorize themselves as American Indian. Additionally,
this one-fourth fraction of Native American blood must
be with a tribe that is officially acknowledged and sanctioned by the federal government (Thornton 2001). In
early 2006 there were about 569 such tribes (Taylor
2006). In order to get one’s tribe recognized by the government, one goes through a lengthy process of forms and
bureaucracy, which is sometimes a challenge for older
members of a tribe struggling with the level of literacy in
bureaucratic language that these forms require. Thus,
there are probably many more U.S. citizens who consider
themselves to have Native American ancestry than are
officially counted by the federal government, who estimates they are only about 1 percent of the total population. This official count, estimated by the U.S. Census,
experienced a sizable increase between the 1960 and 1990
censuses. Researchers pointed out that this “growth” in the
American Indian population was not due to increased
births, and certainly not to migration, but to the increase in
individuals who decided to categorize themselves as Native
American (Thornton 2001; Nagel 1995). This finding
again underscores the socially constructed basis of race.
RELIGION, ECONOMICS, AND
SHARED STIGMA AS RACE
While examining one’s family tree and ancestors is one
way that societies go about determining who belongs in
which race, occasionally, other factors are used. For exam-
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ple, government officials sometimes transform religious
groups into races. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) during Nazi
Germany spoke of the Jews as a race and structured gruesome genocidal public policy around this claim.
Additionally, the U.S. Census records show that in 1930
and 1940, Hindu was given as a choice for racial categorization (Lee 1993). Besides these cases of religion being
racialized, sometimes, one’s social class is used as a marker
for race. In Brazil there is a saying o dinheiro embranquece,
which means “money whitens.” Because there are many
mixtures of skin types in Brazil, skin tone combines with
socioeconomic status to create the notion of race. For
example, if a person is of a mixed skin tone but is dressed
professionally and holds a prestigious position, that person may be considered white while a person with an even
lighter skin tone who appears impoverished might be
labeled black (Taylor 2006).
In a minority of cases, groups who are not in the
majority racially sometimes come together to create a
racial group and ask those in power to sanction it as a new
race. For example, the pan-ethnic racial category of Asian
and Pacific Islander (API) appeared on the U.S. Census
for the first time in 1990 (Lee 1993). This race was created by bridging some major differences in terms of
national origins, languages, and religions. In fact, the
United States had a history of finding favor and disfavor
with different ethnic groups that are now in the API category depending on the political and economic climate of
the day. When the economy became saturated with
Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century, the United
States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. At this time, it
was more favorable to be Japanese. However, during
World War II (1939–1945) when the federal government
placed Japanese Americans (even those who were born
and raised in the United States) into internment camps, it
was more favorable to be Chinese. Despite these and
many other cleavages between the groups that are now
united in the API race, the groups came together under a
specific political climate in the 1980s when the United
States was experiencing an economic recession and some
dominant rhetoric blamed a global Asian face for the job
loss and downward mobility of those who considered
themselves white. Thus, regardless of national origin,
many API individuals began to be scapegoats and targets
of white hostility and even vicious hate crimes (Espiritu
1992). Perceiving common issues of oppression shared
across ethnic lines in the U.S. context was an important
motivating factor in the creation of the API race.
Omi and Winant (1994) developed a theory of racial
formation that underscores how racial categories such as
the API are socially constructed, usually for political ends.
Although in the majority of cases of racial formation the
state uses its power to control what defines a race and who
is allowed to claim membership within it, in a minority of
cases (such as the API category), the initiative to construct
a racial category comes “from below.” These minority
individuals still have to find favor with the state in order
to make their category official. In the case of the one-drop
rule, many people were denied their legal efforts to challenge the state and become recategorized racially. But it is
important to note that in the case of the one-drop rule,
permission was being asked to join into the dominant
group (whites) whereas the API group created a new category that did not upend or challenge the existing racial
hierarchy. Similarly, in 2000, a group of individuals who
considered themselves multiracial effectively lobbied to
change U.S. Census procedure so that for the first time
people could check more than one box to define their
race. Again, this was a movement from below to create
new racial possibilities, and it did not seek to challenge the
dominance of the category white. The closer policing of
the boundaries of whiteness by the state is indicative of
how structured by dominance race is.
DETERMINING WHICH
ETHNICITIES GET TO BE WHITE
Unlike ethnicities that are often directly linked to a particular continent, and usually a specific nation, the concept
of race is an obviously socially constructed category due to
its inability to be traced to any one geographic region.
One cannot point to black or white on a map as one can
with an ethnicity, such as Chinese, Japanese, Jamaican,
Irish, or Mexican. This is particularly evident when studying the dominant category of whiteness. While some
might equate the term white with a term such as
European American, such terminology conceals how
much whiteness has adapted to incorporate various nonEuropean groups over time when it served the purpose of
solidifying the material and ideological advantage of the
category white in a particular area. For example, although
people claiming either Chinese or Japanese ancestry are
placed into the API category (usually known as Asian
Americans) in the United States, during apartheid in
South Africa, individuals with these two ethnicities had
very different racial experiences. The Japanese were classified into the white category, enjoying the social privileges
of the dominant group, while the Chinese were placed
into the “colored” category. Although coloreds were not
treated as poorly as those considered Africans, they
nonetheless were well below whites on the racial hierarchy
(Marger 2006). Thus, when it was crucial and beneficial
for South Africa to maintain positive economic relations
with Japan, it was not in their best interests to consign
Japan’s citizens to second-class status. Treating the
Japanese as whites meant that South African whites could
still cash in on the material advantages that came from
trading and doing business with the Japanese in an
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increasingly globalized marketplace in which China was
not yet a key player.
In the U.S. context, the Irish and the Jews are two
examples of ethnic groups that, although still predominantly European, were not regarded as white upon arrival
into the country and had to “earn” their incorporation
into whiteness. In the early nineteenth century, the Irish
arrived in a mass migration, escaping famine and British
oppression. They had no kind of shared identity with the
largely British white majority in the United States since
the Irish saw the British as their oppressors. Furthermore,
the Irish found themselves still excluded outright from
many of the best jobs and were even targets of the exaggerated big-lipped, ruddy-skinned caricatures that students of history would typically associate with African
Americans. Yet when the political question of the abolition of slavery reached front and center by the middle of
the 1800s, the side that the Irish chose to take en masse
would be an important deciding factor in whether they
became incorporated into whiteness. To side with the
slaves, they perceived, would consign them to the secondclass citizenship they had just worked so hard to flee in
their native land. In coming out decidedly antiabolition
on the slavery question, already speaking the English language, and attaining access to some key positions in civic
life (particularly in New York City), the Irish solidified
their position into the dominant race, white, by the middle of the nineteenth century (Allen 1994; Roediger 1991;
Takaki 1993).
The Jews also faced the kind of in-between racial status upon first arriving to the United States that the
Chinese faced by being categorized as colored in South
Africa. The immigrant Jews certainly were not as ostracized, disenfranchised, and terrorized as African Americans were, but they were not at first deemed worthy of
receiving the full benefits of whiteness. They were
excluded from most major universities and were victims of
prejudices and ethnic slurs (Takaki 1993). Further illustrating the point that race is a relational category, it was
the outright exclusion of blacks from the educational and
housing benefits of the post-World War II GI Bill that catapulted Jews into middle-class status. Not unlike the situation of the upper class Brazilians, Jews gained the favor
of whiteness by their newly acquired socioeconomic status
during an economically prosperous era of U.S. history.
This prosperity was generated in part by huge government
subsidies for both college scholarships and home mortgages, which could be characterized as the nation’s first
affirmative action program, giving all those deemed white
a leg up over their African American counterparts.
Although many blacks technically were eligible for these
benefits due to their service in great numbers to the military during World War II, they were often unable to cash
in on them when prejudiced southern commanders would
6
give them dishonorable discharges for no particular legitimate reason. Moreover, since the Fair Housing Act was
not passed until the late 1960s, it was perfectly legal for
African Americans to be excluded from buying any of the
quality housing to which those deemed white had full
access. The events of this time period have been identified
as the major factor contributing to the movement of Jewish
Americans from nonwhite to white (Brodkin 1998).
STATE-CREATED CATEGORIES
VERSUS PERSONAL IDENTITIES
While one’s state-defined race clearly plays a crucial role in
whether one can access the full material benefits of a society, due to its explicitly hierarchical basis, it is also the case
that individuals are not completely without agency in navigating their relationship to these racial categories. People
all over the globe have always resisted their oppression in
various ways. For example, a U.S. professional golfer
named Tiger Woods resisted the society’s one-drop rule
categorization of himself as African American and
invented the term Cablinasian to encompass his
Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian heritage (Taylor
2006). Furthermore, there is a large group of U.S. citizens
who think of themselves racially as Latino or Hispanic
even though the nation’s census does not allow them the
option of identifying this as their race (unless they write it
in as “Other,” as many do). The census only includes the
racial choices of White, Black/African American, Asian
Pacific Islander, Native American Indian, and Other but
lists various Hispanic national origins under a separate
ethnicity question. This structure actually encourages persons of Latino heritage to either identify as a white
Hispanic or a black Hispanic (as 50% did in 2000), further reifying the country’s dichotomous black–white
divide. Nonetheless, as this group of persons with Latino
heritage in the United States grew exponentially by the
advent of the twenty-first century, national conversations
began to occur about the inadequacy of the state categories for race to adequately measure their experiences
(Swarns 2004).
Because of the extreme occupational, residential, and
social segregation that continues to exist in the United
States, distinct cultural and ethnic patterns have come to
be associated with these state-identified racial categories.
For example, due to their exclusion from white churches,
African Americans developed decisively different worship
patterns even from those who shared their same denominations as Christians. Additionally, due to the many prohibitions during slavery of African Americans from
socializing and congregating with each other, they also
developed their own distinct linguistic patterns. Cultural
developments and distinctions like these often lead to
people talking about feeling (or not feeling) black, white,
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Asian, and so on. France Winddance Twine found that
some young women of African descent who had mixed
parentage and grew up in affluent suburban communities
stated that they did not feel black until they came to college campuses where they were not the only token minority and together with others developed a more politicized
understanding of racial identity (Twine 1997).
Conversely, many whites who subscribe to a colorblind
racial ideology state that they do not feel white or see
themselves as white at all (McKinney 2005; Bush 2004).
Nonetheless, due to the sedimentation of racial inequality
(Oliver and Shapiro 1995) where whites collectively transmit their “ill-gotten gains” from slavery and segregation in
the form of wealth to succeeding generations (Feagin
2000), these whites still gain a material advantage from
being white even if they do not see themselves that way.
Beyond feeling culturally and emotionally linked (or
not) to particular racial identities, some individuals may
eschew state-created racial categories for other reasons.
When perceiving that the dominant culture has a particular disdain for individuals of a certain race, new immigrants may seek to distance themselves from that racial
categorization, especially when the dominant culture’s
tendency is to lump them into that negatively perceived
category. For example, some members of immigrant
groups who would be classified as blacks in the United
States, such as Samoans, West Indians, and Haitians, have
been found to distance themselves from the racial category
of black due to the pervasive antiblack stereotypes they
encounter about such things as work ethic and dedication
to education (Waters 1999). Similarly, sensing negative
prejudices about Mexicans in the United States, some
Cuban Americans and other South American Latinos have
chosen to stress their national heritages over a more global
racial identity as Hispanic (Fernandez-Kelly and
Schauffler 1994). Although it is difficult to escape the systemic benefits or lack thereof of being deemed within a
particular racial group (as a pseudoscientific birthright),
individuals certainly do participate upon occasion in challenging, at least at the personal identity level, their affiliation with an assumed racial group.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION,
MATERIAL REALITY
Race is not skin color, nor is it ethnic identity. It is not
reducible to genetics. Indeed, there is much more genetic
and physiological variation within the members of any
given race than between individuals of different races. It
has been estimated that the overlap between genetic material of people of any two racial groups is about 99 percent,
so less than 1 percent of physiological differences can be
explained by race (Lewontin 1996). Moreover, eventually,
all genetic material of human beings traces back to Africa,
where the earliest human remains were found (Feagin
2000). It has been established that any separate race (other
than the human race) is not an actual scientific category
and is, instead, a social construction. The assertion that
race is a social construction, though, should not be confused with the notion that race is a complete fabrication
only needing deconstruction (or simply ignoring/discrediting) to no longer be relevant. Even if governments
decided to stop recording the racial categorizations of
their citizens (as many outside of the United States have),
race would still continue to be a fundamental organizing
principle in society.
As has been demonstrated, the concept of race originated as an ideology meant to justify colonization and
exploitation of people who happened to be, usually,
darker-skinned than their exploiters. Material conditions
between those who were eventually to be considered separate, superior/inferior races were already starkly unequal
by the time the pseudoscientific category of race was formalized. Rigid laws enforcing the so-called superior racial
group’s advantages and the so-called inferior group’s disadvantages continued for centuries. These chains have only
been lifted, as of early 2006, for a few decades, and the
material advantage/disadvantage gap has been so solidified
that people’s ways of thinking, being, and doing are still
very much tied to this way of relating called race.
Moreover, the pseudoscientific claims of racial difference
in intelligence, athletic/physical ability, and other characteristics are constantly resurging into the present day.
People are also finding other ways to further racialized
understandings of the world without even mentioning
race by using various code words and rhetorical strategies
to camouflage what, in the end, has a very similar effect in
organizing the social world into superior and inferior
beings (Bonilla-Silva 2003).
Thus, regardless of how socially constructed race is,
for better or for worse, society is stuck with its legacies.
The rigid boundaries it was invented to enforce have created distinct cultures and ways of being. To even expect
that these racial categories could eventually remain in
society in a more benign way as nominal ways of distinguishing between separate but equally valued cultural
groups is to confuse race with ethnicity. Race’s raison
d’etre was never solely to distinguish between various
national and cultural heritages; it was always proposed in
a hierarchical order, with attached value judgments of
superior/inferior and corresponding material advantages
or disadvantages. Until society addresses the material
foundations of race and rectifies the resulting imbalances,
simply deciding to erase race linguistically from the vocabulary will hardly get rid of it as a fundamental organizing
principle of social life.
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Marriage, Interracial; Miscegenation; Race
Mixing; Race Relations; Racialization; Racism
SEE ALSO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Theodore W. 1994. The Invention of the White Race
Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control. New York:
Verso.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 1997. Rethinking Racism: Toward a
Structural Interpretation. American Sociological Review 62 (3):
465–480.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the
United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks and What
That Says About Race in America. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Bush, Melanie E. L. 2004. Breaking the Code of Good Intentions:
Everyday Forms of Whiteness. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Espiritu, Yen Le. 1992. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging
Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Eze, Emmanuel C. 1997. Immanual Kant: On the Different
Races of Man. In Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed.
Emmanuel C. Eze, 38–48. London: Blackwell.
Feagin, Joe R. 2000. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and
Future Reparations. New York: Routledge.
Feagin, Joe R., and Clairece Booher Feagin. 1999. Racial and
Ethnic Relations. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall.
Fernandez-Kelly, M., Patricia Schauffler, and Richard Schauffler.
1994. Divided Fates: Immigrant Children in a Restructured
US Economy. International Migration Review 28: 662–689.
Gould, Stephen J. 1994. The Geometer of Race. Discover
(November): 65–69.
Graves, Joseph L., Jr. 2004. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race
Exists in America. New York: Dutton.
Hall, Stuart. 1980. Race Articulation and Societies Structured in
Dominance. In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism,
ed. UNESCO, 305–345. Paris: UNESCO.
Hannaford, Ivan. 1996. Race: The History of an Idea in the West.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. Whiteness as Property. In Black on
White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David
R. Roediger, 103–118. New York: Schocken Books.
Horsman, Reginald. 1997. Race and Manifest Destiny: The
Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. In Critical
White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, ed. Richard
Delgado, and Jean Stefancic, 139–144. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Marger, Martin N. 2006. Race and Ethnic Relations: American
and Global Perspectives. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson
Wadsworth.
McKinney, Karyn D. 2005. Being White: Stories of Race and
Racism. New York: Routledge.
8
Lee, Sharon M. 1993. Racial Classifications in the US Census:
1890–1990. Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1): 75–94.
Lewontin, Richard C. 1995. Human Diversity. New York: W. H.
Freeman.
Nagel, Joanne. 1995. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Politics
and the Resurgence of Identity. American Sociological Review
60: 947–965.
Oliver, Melvin L., and Thomas M. Shapiro. 1995. Black
Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality.
New York: Routledge.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in
the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Roediger, David. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso.
Swarns, Rachel L. 2004. Hispanics Resist Racial Grouping by
Census. New York Times, October 24.
Takaki, Ronald. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of
Multicultural America. 1st ed. Boston: Little Brown.
Taylor, Howard F. 2006. Defining Race. In Race and Ethnicity in
Society: The Changing Landscape, ed. Elizabeth
Higginbotham, and Margaret L. Andersen, 47–54. Belmont,
CA: Thomson/Wadsworth.
Thomas, William Isaac and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. 1923. The
Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Thornton, Russell. 2001. Trends among American Indians in the
United States. In America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their
Consequences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and
Faith Mitchell, 135–169, Washington, DC: National
Academies Press.
Twine, France Winddance. 1997. Brown-Skinned White Girls:
Class, Culture, and the Construction of White Identity in
Suburban Communities. In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in
Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg,
214–243. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Waters, Mary C. 1999. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant
Dreams and American Realities. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Yetman, Norman. 2004. Prejudice and Discrimination. In Race,
Ethnicity and Gender: Selected Readings, ed. Joseph F. Healey,
and Eileen O’Brien, 8–20. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge
Press.
Eileen O’Brien
RACE AND
ANTHROPOLOGY
The history of anthropology has been closely identified
with the study of race. In the early twenty-first century the
concept of race is highly contested among anthropologists, some of whom claim that it does not exist in either
biology or society except as an objectionable, stigmatizing
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fiction. Its problematic biological status has led some to
assume a “no-race” stance that resonates with the colorblind ideology that has gained popularity in some segments of U.S. society. Color blindness denies the extant
social significance and the experiential and institutional
materiality of race, races, and racial inequalities.
Race is an ideologically charged and invidious social
distinction (Berreman 1972). As a social and often legally
codified classification, it is applied to populations presumed to share common physical, biological, or natural
attributes believed to be heritable. The “naturalizing”
effect of many racial discourses translates into claims that
the social disparities linked to racial divisions exist naturally rather than having emerged as a result of human
practices and inventions. Due to the imprecision of what
physical variation, biology, and nature actually mean and
the slippage between culture and biology within any cultural context, race is difficult to define in a manner that
clearly differentiates it from ethnicity, nationality, or even
gender. The permanence and fixity conventionally associated with nature and biology are questionable due to “the
human organism’s [and nature’s] constant state of
change”—often in response to human interventions
(Wade 2002, p. 6). A cross-cultural approach reveals that
in certain parts of the world (e.g., Latin America) racial
identification can shift, and the extent to which it is based
on appearance, ancestry, or sociocultural status varies.
Anthropological inquiry is rethinking and attempting to
provide clearer operational definitions for the basic categories around which the social analysis of race has been
built. Terms such as phenotype, nature, biology, blood, and
heredity must be scrutinized in view of the unspoken
assumptions underpinning them. Rethinking the parameters of race is being done, from different angles, in all of
the discipline’s subfields: social and cultural anthropology,
anthropological linguistics, archaeology (particularly historical archaeology), and biological anthropology (especially the specialty in which a critical biocultural approach
is employed).
Although race has long been a gloss for human biological variation, they are not the same. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along with the first half of
the twentieth, the race concept was used to make sense of
the diversity of human phenotypes, which were assumed
to index fundamental biological and sociocultural differences. Biological variation is more complex than the physiognomic diacritics that came to signify race in the broad
geographically based taxonomies formulated in 1735 by
the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) and
in 1795 by the German professor of medicine Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). Beneath the skin’s
surface are differences of blood type and strings of DNA.
However, genetic variation among human beings is small.
Humans are 99.9 percent alike genetically, with most of
the difference “involv[ing] modest degrees of variation in
the frequency of shared genes” (IUAES). Most of this is
within groups rather than between them. Socially targeted
differences ignited the imagination of folk theorists and
scientists, who drew on the popular consciousness to construct the formal typologies conferred the legitimacy of
science.
Skin color, hair texture, and morphological traits
were visible markers used to develop universal taxonomies
for classifying human populations during the age of
European exploration and colonial expansion. These differences were linked to social and moral characteristics
that stereotyped and rank-ordered the world’s populations
in a global hierarchy (Fluehr-Lobban 2005). These hierarchical classifications naturalized perceived cultural variation and culturalized what was defined as nature. They
also justified the colonial expansion that gave rise to a
modern world system of culture, power, and political
economy in which privileged western Europeans exercised
supremacy over the heterogeneous peoples, habitats, and
resources of the world. These structures of domination
were predicated on the land alienation, coerced labor, and
repressive state policies that racialized colonial landscapes,
with the transatlantic region playing a central role in the
transfers of value that were a catalyst for the Industrial
Revolution (Williams 1944; Wolf 1982). This momentous transition in social evolution occurred in the context
of the transatlantic slave trade and related forms of
enslavement established throughout the Americas.
Although color/phenotype prejudice preexisted the
modern world system, race as a worldview (Smedley
2007) and material relation did not emerge until the
“post-1400s western European racist order” (Sanjek 1994,
p. 8). According to St. Clair Drake (1911–1990), skincolor prejudice and slavery converged for the first time in
the New World’s colonies of exploitation where the conditions for racial slavery arose (Drake 1987). This transformation laid the foundation for a global racial hierarchy
in which sub-Saharan Africans represented the most
extreme variant of cultural and racial difference. The
primitive savagery attributed to Africa and other peripheralized zones of the world system represented the binary
opposite of western Europe’s purportedly advanced civilizations.
A chapter in the multinational history of racial
typologies is that in which Count Arthur de Gobineau
(1816–1882) elaborated the notion of the natural
inequality of human races and Aryan supremacy in his
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the
Inequality of Human Races, 1851–1855). The part of this
history that is usually omitted is that Joseph-Anténor
Firmin (1850–1911), a Haitian who belonged to the
Anthropology Society of Paris, wrote De l’égalité des races
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humaines: Anthropologie positive (The Equality of the
Human Races: Positivist Anthropology, 1885), a robust
rebuttal and alternative approach to the study of
humankind (Fluehr-Lobban 2005, pp. 110–116). Similar
debates occurred in other national and regional contexts,
including Latin America, where interpretations of Charles
Darwin’s (1809–1882) evolutionary theory were
informed by cultural orientations significantly different
from those of Anglo North America. The Anglo-dominant United States emphasized the permanence and
mutual exclusivity of race and that whiteness was constructed along lines of purity. In Brazil and elsewhere in
Latin America, whiteness was tied to the idea, goal, and
social process of race mixing and its implicit ideal, whitening—becoming white by marrying up the social scale or
by acquiring wealth and assimilating socially valued cultural and linguistic characteristics.
Throughout the nineteenth and at least half of the
twentieth centuries, scientific racism or racialism
(Lieberman 2003) was espoused within theological and
secular varieties of monogenesis and polygenesis. At the
height of the antislavery movement, polygenists, claiming
that a single genesis could not account for the diversity of
the world’s peoples, honed the technical capacity of
phrenology and craniometry to measure differences. They
also promulgated their research results through scientific
outlets, popular culture, and political debate. Samuel T.
Morton (1799–1851), Josiah Clark Nott (1804–1873),
and George Gliddon (1809–1857), who constituted the
core of the early American school of anthropology,
attempted to substantiate the hierarchical ranking of the
races, with the Caucasoid at the top, the Mongoloid in the
middle, and the Negroid at the bottom. Louis Agassiz
(1807–1873), a Harvard professor, supported their polygenetic findings and advised President Abraham Lincoln
(1809–1865) that freed blacks were incapable of becoming the equals of whites. Later in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, biodeterminism developed along the
lines of social Darwinism, couched in Darwinian categories but filtered through Spencerianism. These views
underpinned the unilinear evolutionism of Edward B.
Tylor (1832–1917) and the physical anthropology of Ale°
Hrdliĉka (1869–1943), leaders in anthropology’s professionalization. Anthropology’s scientific racism also provided ideological fuel for the eugenics movement.
Through sterilization and immigration restrictions, it
aimed to limit the growth of poverty, criminality, and
intellectual inferiority believed to be concentrated among
African Americans, immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe, and the poor. Eugenics laws developed in the
United States were later used as models for population
control policies in Nazi Germany. Also philanthropic support from the United States contributed to the rise of Nazi
anthropology (Schafft 2004).
10
A paradigm shift occurred under the leadership of the
Columbia University professor Franz Boas (1858–1942),
whose research challenged the dominant perspectives on
immigrants and other racialized segments of society.
Conceptualizing race, language, and culture as distinct
domains (Boas 1911, 1940), he influenced many colleagues and students, including Ruth Benedict (1887–
1948), Margaret Mead (1901–1978), Melville Herskovits
(1895–1963), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Ella
Deloria (1888–1971, Dakota Sioux), and Ashley
Montagu (1905–1999). Montagu (1942) insisted that
race was a fallacy and advocated the alternative notions of
genogroup and ethnic group. By World War II
(1939–1945) Boasianism had become more widely
accepted. It cleared the ground for major shifts in the
1960s, when race’s biological status was refuted
(Livingstone 1962). Many sociocultural anthropologists
assumed that race was not useful for understanding social
distinctions. This led to a silence concerning structural
racism.
The Boasian agenda was not the only antiracist trajectory to influence anthropology. W. E. B. Du Bois
(1868–1963) produced critical social analysis that in
many respects paralleled Boasian thought (Baker 1998;
Harrison 1992). He was part of a tradition of black racial
vindication that contested biodeterminist ideas. Early
African American anthropologists, trained in leading
graduate departments but also influenced by Du Bois’s
noncanonical public intellectualism, often undertook
antiracist scholarship, which entailed negotiating the tensions between mainstream disciplinary approaches and
more critical interdisciplinary frameworks. The physical
anthropologists Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948) and W.
Montague Cobb (1904–1990) along with the social
anthropologists W. Allison Davis (1902–1983) and St.
Clair Drake exemplify this trend (Harrison and Harrison
1999). Davis and Drake, under W. Lloyd Warner’s
(1898–1970) supervision, provided important inputs into
the collaboratively produced Deep South: A Social
Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Davis et al.
1941). Drake and Horace Cayton’s (1903–1970) Black
Metropolis (1945), which became a race relations classic,
combined the methods and analytical perspectives of
anthropology and sociology. These books’ receptions in
anthropology were negligible.
After anthropology’s “biological revolution,” when
the discipline was largely silent about social race and
racism, Marvin Harris (1927–2001), St. Clair Drake,
Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987), Gerald Berreman, and
John Ogbu (1939–2003) kept these issues alive, often
bringing cross-cultural perspectives and data to bear on
them. In the 1980s Virginia Dominguez (1986) and
James W. Loewen (1988) explicated the social construction and dynamics of race, including how they related to
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the social identities of Euro-Americans and Asian
Americans. Eric Wolf ’s (1923–1999) anthropological history of world capitalism (1982) elucidated the differences
between ethnicity and race, with race being associated
with forced exclusion, stigmatized labor, and other types
of dehumanization. Brackette F. Williams (1989) illuminated the ways race and ethnicity operate as distinct yet
closely interrelated dimensions of identity formation in
projects of imagining, building, and contesting nations.
Since the early 1990s there has been an expanded
interest in race (Harrison 1995, 2002). In good part this
has arisen because of race’s heightened volatility in many
parts of the world, especially under the conditions and
outcomes of globalization: technologically mediated timespace compression, widening disparities in subsistence
security and wealth, new migrations, transnational cultural citizenries, and diasporic identities. Sociocultural
anthropologists have investigated the multiple histories
and cultural dynamics of race, the persistence of its social
significance, the shifts in its meanings, and its overt
and covert modalities (Smedley 2007; Baker 1998).
Neoracisms without races, the social censorship of talk
about race and racism, and race’s intersections with gender and class have also captured anthropologists’ scrutiny
and ethnographic gaze. Research is being undertaken in
many parts of the world, from eastern Europe, where
postcommunist restructuring has exacerbated discrimination against the region’s Roma (“Gypsies”), to the more
paradigmatic settings of the United States, South Africa,
and Brazil, which have long been a focus of debates over
the varieties of racial formation (Scheffel 2005; Sheriff
2001; Wilson 2001).
A great deal of attention has been given to the social
life of discourses that biologize or culturalize difference—
that is, use notions of culture to produce racializing
effects. Linguistic anthropologists have examined language practices that contribute to or resist the dynamics of
racialization. Their approach to the racial politics of language may lead them from explicit hate language to covert
language whose efficacy is affected by indirect indexes or
widely understood but never directly articulated nonreferential meanings (Hill 1998). Critical biocultural anthropologists explore the embodied experiences that affect
human exposure to stress and susceptibility to diseases. In
their view, race affects the internal and external workings
of the body, which is always situated in a nexus of power.
These dynamics have health-related outcomes. Racism has
concrete consequences for human biology, which is socialized in historically specific contexts of culture, power, and
political ecology (Goodman and Leatherman 1998).
Historical archaeology is also unburying new layers of
understanding about past landscapes of race and racism.
Studies of the material cultural remnants of plantation
slavery, maroons (runaways), free and freed communities,
and the cultural life of other racialized or subracialized
groups (e.g., Irish immigrants) fill in some of the gaps that
historiographical research cannot (Orser 1998; Singleton
2006).
Other trends are studies of whiteness, which shift
from the traditional focus on racial subordinates (Brodkin
1998; Buck 2001). Critical studies of race and racism are
also examining indigeneity, especially in contexts in which
the concept of ethnicity has provided the conventional
analytical lens (Cowlishaw 1999; Wade 1997). Analyses of
nontraditional Indians and African descendants with a
history of contact with or even citizenship in Indian
nations are disrupting conventional boundaries of classification and identity (Sturm 2002; Warren 2001). There
are also studies of racism as a site of human rights violation and of antiracism’s place within the international
context of human rights struggle (Banton 1996; Harrison
2005).
Finally, anthropologists have been vigilant in challenging the latest revival of biological determinism (e.g.,
Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Current Anthropology 1996)
and in detecting the potential dangers of reifying race in
the Human Genome Project. The intellectual and ideological heterogeneity of anthropology precludes a consensus. In light of this, it should be of no surprise that the bell
curve thesis made sense to Vincent Sarich (1995) or that
Glenn Custred coauthored Proposition 209, the 1996
California civil rights initiative that aimed to dismantle
affirmative action. Race has figured prominently in
anthropology’s history of ideas and public engagement.
That relationship is likely to persist.
Anthropology; Anthropology, Biological;
Anthropology, Linguistic; Boas, Franz; Colorism;
Determinism, Biological; Drake, St. Clair; Du Bois,
W. E. B.; Heredity; Hurston, Zora Neale; Mead,
Margaret; Montagu, Ashley; Nature vs. Nurture;
Other, The; Race; Racial Classification; Racialization;
Racism; Social Constructionism; Social Constructs;
White Supremacy; Whiteness
SEE ALSO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Lee D. 1998. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the
Construction of Race, 1896–1954. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Banton, Michael. 1996. International Action against Racial
Discrimination. Oxford: Clarendon.
Berreman, Gerald D. 1972. Race, Caste, and Other Invidious
Distinctions in Social Stratification. Race 13 (4): 385–414.
Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich [1795] 1895. On the Natural
Variety of Mankind. 3rd ed. In The Anthropological Treatises of
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. and ed. Thomas
Bendyshe. London: Longman, Green.
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Boas, Franz. [1911] 1963. The Mind of Primitive Man. Rev. ed.
New York: Collier.
Boas, Franz. 1940. Race, Language, and Culture. New York:
Macmillan.
Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks and What
That Says about Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Buck, Pem Davidson. 2001. Worked to the Bone: Race, Class,
Power, and Privilege in Kentucky. New York: Monthly Review.
Cowlishaw, Gillian. 1999. Rednecks, Eggheads, and Blackfellas: A
Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Current Anthropology. 1996. The Eternal Triangle: Race, Class,
and IQ. Reviews on The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life 37 (February supp.): S181.
Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner.
[1941] 1988. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of
Caste and Class. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American
Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
De Gobineau, Arthur. [1851–1855] 1967. The Inequality of
Human Races. Trans. Adrian Collins. New York: Fertig.
Dominguez, Virginia R. 1986. White by Definition: Social
Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Drake, St. Clair 1987. Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in
History and Anthropology. Los Angeles: Center for AfroAmerican Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
Drake, St. Clair, and Horace Cayton. [1945] 1993. Black
Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Firmin, Joseph-Anténor. [1885] 2000. The Equality of the
Human Races: Positivist Anthropology. Trans. Asselin Charles.
New York: Garland.
Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2005. Race and Racism: An
Introduction. Lanham, MD: AltaMira.
Goodman, Alan, and Thomas Leatherman, eds. 1998. Building
a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on
Human Biology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Harrison, Faye V. 1992. The Du Boisian Legacy in
Anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 12 (3): 239–260.
Harrison, Faye V. 1995. The Persistent Power of “Race” in the
Cultural and Political Economy of Racism. Annual Review of
Anthropology 24: 47–74.
Harrison, Faye V. 2002. Unraveling “Race” for the Twenty-First
Century. In Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines,
ed. Jeremy MacClancy, 145–166. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Harrison, Faye V., ed. 2005. Resisting Racism and Xenophobia:
Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Harrison, Ira E., and Faye V. Harrison. 1999. African-American
Pioneers in Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell
Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New
York: Free Press.
Hill, Joan H. 1998. Language, Race, and White Public Space.
American Anthropologist 100 (3): 680–689.
12
IUAES (International Union of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences). n.d. Proposed Replacement Statement
for the UNESCO Documents on Biological Aspects of Race.
http://www.leidenuniv.nl/fsw/iuaes/08-race.htm.
Lieberman, Leonard. 2003. A History of “Scientific” Liberalism.
In Race and Ethnicity: An Anthropological Focus on the United
States and the World, ed. Raymond Scupin, 36–66. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Linnaeus, Carolus. [1735] 1806. A General System of Nature.
London: Lackington, Allen.
Livingstone, Frank B. 1962. On the Non-Existence of Human
Races. Current Anthropology 3: 279–281.
Loewen, James W. 1988. The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black
and White. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
Montagu, Ashley. [1942] 1975. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The
Fallacy of Race. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Orser, Charles E., Jr. 1998. The Challenge of Race to American
Historical Archaeology. American Anthropologist 100 (3):
661–668.
Sanjek, Roger. 1994. The Enduring Inequalities of Race. In Race,
eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek, 1–17. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Sarich, Vincent. 1995. In Defense of The Bell Curve: The Reality
of Race and the Importance of Human Difference. Skeptic 3
(3): 84–93.
Schafft, Gretchen E. 2004. From Racism to Genocide:
Anthropology in the Third Reich. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Scheffel, David Z. 2005. Svinia in Black and White: Slovak Roma
and Their Neighbors. Toronto: Broadview.
Sheriff, Robin E. 2001. Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and
Racism in Urban Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Singleton, Theresa. 2006. African Diaspora Archaeology in
Dialogue. In Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the
Diaspora, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington, 249–287. Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research Press.
Smedley, Audrey. 2007. Race in North America: Origin and
Evolution of a Worldview. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Sturm, Circe. 2002. Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in
the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Wade, Peter. 1997. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London:
Pluto.
Wade, Peter. 2002. Race, Nature, and Culture: An Anthropological
Perspective. London: Pluto.
Warren, Jonathan W. 2001. Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and
Indian Resurgence in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Williams, Brackette F. 1989. A Class Act: Anthropology and the
Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain. Annual Review of
Anthropology 18: 401–444.
Williams, Eric. [1944] 1994. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel
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Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Faye V. Harrison
RACE AND ECONOMICS
Commentaries by political economists about the concepts
of race and ethnicity and the implications of those categories for economic behavior and outcomes date back to
the eighteenth century. Classical political economists generally maintained that all groups have comparable abilities
to make rational economic decisions. Variations in
observed outcomes among groups were explained in terms
of history, luck, and incentives. Incentives and markets
were seen as especially powerful forces capable of generating convergence in observed outcomes. In contrast, most
postclassical economists believed that permanent and
semipermanent group differences in desirable wealth-generating characteristics are primarily responsible for differences in levels of development.
Although the Irish were often a principal subject of
discussion, the colonization of the Americas and the massive expansion of African enslavement ensured that attention would shift to Native Americans and blacks. Much of
that discourse consisted of thinly veiled rationalizations
for policies of discrimination, exploitation, and oppression through assertions that the victims were less than
fully human. The expropriation of Native American land
was justified by a “natural law” argument by which socalled civilized communities were divinely mandated to
master and transform that environment.
EARLY THEORIES
Philosophers’ theories of Caucasian, Aryan, and AngloSaxon racial superiority provided a rubric for distinguishing between the civilized and the uncivilized. The
philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) insisted, for
example, on the universality of human nature in 1748,
but by 1753 he had become a staunch proponent of racial
hierarchies. Hume wrote, “I am apt to suspect the negroes
and in general all the other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized
nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any
individual eminent either in action or speculation.”
(Morton 2002, p. 3).
Such contrived claims about black inferiority served
to justify enslavement. As was noted by Eric Williams,
“Slavery in no way implied, in any scientific sense, the
inferiority of the Negro” (Williams 1994, p. 29).
Supporters of slavery predicted disastrous consequences if
blacks were emancipated. The inaccuracy of those predic-
tions did not deter mid-nineteenth-century postclassical
economists who were influenced by the writings of
anthropologists from fully endorsing notions of differences among racial groups in the capacity to exercise
economic rationality. Nonwhites and the Irish were characterized as “lower races,” and the category “Africanoid
Celt” and an “Index of Nigrescence” were introduced in
1870 to measure how close the Irish were to blacks (Levy
and Peart 2002).
DARWIN AND MARX
Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life provided additional fuel for
speculations about racial hierarchies, although Darwin
and some of his supporters were dubious about the extent
to which the dictum “survival of the fittest” could be
applied appropriately to human beings. Alfred Russel
Wallace, for example, insisted in 1864 that natural selection does not apply to humans because of ethical issues
deriving from the phenomenon of human sympathy.
However, prominent social Darwinists, including Herbert
Spencer (1820–1903) and William Graham Sumner
(1840–1910), argued that human progress depends on
unbridled competition in all areas of economic life. As
individuals sought to improve their circumstances, continuous movement toward the perfection of the human
race inevitably would occur.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was fascinated by Darwin’s
work, although his views about race were more nuanced
than those of most of his contemporaries. Although Marx
and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) envisioned the eventual
disappearance of national and ethnic identities through the
expansion of global capitalism, Marx recognized that in the
interim a variety of social formations were sustainable and
that economic progress “does not prevent the same economic basis … from displaying endless variations and gradations in its appearance, as the result of innumerable
different empirical circumstances, natural conditions,
racial relations, historical influences acting from outside,
etc.” (Marx 1991 Capital, vol. 3, p. 927).
Marx’s sensitivity to issues of race and culture is evident in his discussion of Native American societies, in
which he expressed special admiration for the Iroquois,
highlighting their “sense of independence” and “personal
dignity.” In addition, his writings are generally devoid of
many of the prevailing stereotypes about non-Western traditional societies, including India and pre-Columbian
Mexico (Anderson 2002). Nevertheless, the influence of
Darwin is suggested by Marx’s comments about the
dependency of barbaric and semibarbaric countries on civilized ones, indicating that he, like most thinkers of that
period, failed to recognize white supremacy as an overarch-
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ing global phenomenon (Robinson 1983). However,
unlike most postclassical economists, Marx believed that
differences in levels of social development among groups
could be mediated through social interventions rather than
reflecting a permanent pattern enshrined by innate genetically or culturally based variations in development potential. He argued that “all this crippling under existing social
relations has arisen historically, and in the same way can be
abolished again in the course of historical development”
(Marx and Engels 1976, p. 425). That view resonated with
those of classical political economists who insisted on the
efficacy of incentives and markets to produce convergence
in economic behavior and outcomes.
RACIAL HIERARCHIES IN
POSTCLASSICAL ECONOMICS
Pseudoscientific notions of racial hierarchies can be found
in the writings of several prominent postclassical economists, including William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall,
Arthur Pigou (1907), John R. Commons, and Irving
Fisher (1930). In 1871 Jevons stated: “A man of lower
race, a negro, for instance, enjoys possession less, and
loathes labour more; his exertions, therefore, soon stop. A
poor savage would be content to gather the almost gratuitous fruits of nature, if they were sufficient to give sustenance; it is only physical work which drives him to
exertion” (Jevons 1871, p. 183). Those postclassical economists explored a variety of areas in which racial variations
in economic rationality were hypothesized to exist,
including labor supply, family size, consumption, and savings decisions. Marshall wrote about savage life ruled by
custom and impulse in which there was no conception of
future planning and rational economic decision-making
and people were incapable of steady work. Individuals
belonging to the “lower races” were deemed to be especially prone to the consumption of luxury goods and alcoholic beverages (Marshall 1891).
Large-scale migration from southern and eastern
Europe to the United States beginning in the last decade
of the nineteenth century led to the extension of notions
of racial inferiority to those population groups. In 1907
Commons warned, for example, that the new immigrants
were genetically inferior and would reduce the genetic
quality of the nation. Various postclassical economists
characterized those immigrants as “untaxed imports” and
advocated eugenics policies to improve the genetic pool of
the nation, including measures to encourage fertility
among the “superior” genetic stock and reduce fertility
among those with “inferior” natural abilities, including
permanent segregation, sterilization, and selective restrictions on immigration (Levy and Peart 2002).
As described by William Darity, several researchers
who were actively involved with the American Economic
14
Association during its formative years subscribed to the
view that African Americans eventually would face extinction as a result of a combination of genetic deficiencies
and social maladjustment. Proponents of that view
refused to discard the underlying assumptions of black
inferiority even after demographic trends contradicted the
predictions associated with the “Black Disappearance
Hypothesis” (Darity 1994).
REVIVAL OF THE CLASSICAL VIEW
Beginning in the 1930s, the Chicago School played a pivotal role in reviving the classical tradition of treating individuals as possessing equal competence to engage in
rational economic decision-making and reestablishing the
critical role of incentives and markets in conditioning
human behavior. Frank Knight’s 1931 critique of the presumed correlation between time preference and race in a
1931 review of Irving Fisher’s Theory of Interest was a
major turning point.
George Stigler and Gary Becker also helped undermine postclassical views about racially distinct time preferences. Becker’s well-known “taste” or preference theory
of discrimination has determined the contours of discussions about race for most contemporary neoclassical economists (Becker 1957). His analysis was conceived as a
response to the failure of economists to examine the phenomenon of racial economic discrimination systematically. Two exceptions to the pattern of neglect of this topic
noted by Becker include a 1952 study of black workers in
southern industry by Donald Dewey and a 1955 analysis
of occupational racial wage differentials by Morton
Zeman. In Becker’s model social identities are treated as
economically nonproductive individual characteristics
that may, however, have significant economic consequences. A racial group thus can be treated simply as the
aggregation of those individuals identified by a particular
classifying parameter, allowing neoclassical economists to
ignore the economic implications of individuals’ decisions
for the intensity of group identification. The key theoretical conclusion flowing from Becker’s model is that the
competitive forces of the market inevitably undermine the
economic impact of racial prejudices, which are presumably irrational. However, the persistence of inequality in
outcomes across groups has been documented, and this
finding poses a formidable challenge to the efficacy of
Becker’s model. Among others, Patrick Mason (1999) has
suggested that racial discrimination may be consistent
with the competitive process.
LATER RECONCEPTUALIZATIONS
Efforts to explain persistent racial differentials have generated two markedly different approaches to reconceptualizing the relationship between race and economic
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outcomes. One approach reintroduces the postclassical
notion of racial hierarchies. Monographs by George Gilder
and Charles Murray in the early 1980s assert that differentials in economic outcomes between blacks and whites
stem primarily from dysfunctional behaviors endemic to
black culture, including willful refusal to adhere to the traditional American values of hard work, self-reliance, future
orientation, thriftiness, a strong emphasis on education,
and individualism. Economists such as Thomas Sowell and
Walter Williams readily integrated aspects of this discourse
into their writings in the 1980s, and subsequently the
number of subscribers to those views increased significantly (Akerlof and Kranton 2000; Loury 2002). Although
claims about black genetic inferiority that were prominent
during the postclassical period have been resurrected, few
economists have been willing to endorse those claims
openly (Herrnstein and Murray 1994).
The second approach to reconceptualizing the ways in
which race affects economic behavior and outcomes revives
the classical tradition of focusing on the role of incentives
and institutions in reducing disparities and is associated
with the emergent subdiscipline of stratification economics. Stratification economists conceptualize race as a produced form of personal identity that is responsive to
changes in incentives for altruistic versus antagonistic
behavior in social interactions. Collective identity is
deemed to have economic value even as there are also costs
to identity formation. As a consequence, reductions in
intergroup wealth differentials are a necessary but not
sufficient condition for eroding traditional patterns of collective identification. This conclusion is consistent with
Marx’s views on the value of culture and institutions.
Stratification economists believe that racial disparities and
racial discrimination are endemic features of the U.S.
economy and social systems that are reproduced by a myriad of institutional practices that require transformation to
produce outcomes characterized by sustainable reductions
in racial differentials. Like Marx, stratification economists
recognize that historical inertia is a powerful barrier to
change, leading to caution in making predictions about
short-term reductions in racial differentials.
Akerlof, George A.; American Economic
Association; Culture; Darwin, Charles;
Discrimination; Economics; Economics, Classical;
Economics, Neoclassical; Economics, Stratification;
Fisher, Irving; Hume, David; Immigration; Inequality,
Racial; Marshall, Alfred; Marx, Karl; Race; Race and
Religion; Racism; Stratification; Williams, Eric
SEE ALSO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Akerlof, George D., and Rachel E. Kranton. 2000. Economics
and Identity. Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (3):
715–733.
Anderson, Kevin. 2002. Marx’s Late Writings on Non-Western
and Pre-Capitalist Societies and Gender. Rethinking Marxism
14 (4): 84–96.
Becker, Gary Stanley. 1957. The Economics of Discrimination.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bigelow, Gordon. 2003. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of
Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Commons, John Rogers. 1907. Races and Immigrants in America.
New York and London: Macmillan.
Darity, William, Jr. 1994. Many Roads to Extinction: Early AEA
Economists and the Black Disappearance Hypothesis. History
of Economics Review 21: 47–64.
Darity, William, Jr. 2005. Stratification Economics: The Role of
Intergroup Inequality. Journal of Economics and Finance 29
(2): 144–153.
Darity, William, Jr., Patrick Mason, and James Stewart. 2006.
The Economics of Identity: The Origin and Persistence of
Racial Identity Norms. Journal of Economic and Behavioral
Organization 60 (3): 283–305.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life. London: J. Murray.
Dewey, Donald. 1952. Negro Employment in Southern
Industry. Journal of Political Economy 60 (4): 279–293.
Fisher, Irving. 1930. Theory of Interest as Determined by
Impatience to Spend Income and Opportunity to Invest It. New
York: Macmillan.
Gilder, George. 1981. Wealth and Poverty. New York: Basic
Books.
Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell
Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New
York: Free Press.
Jevons, W. Stanley. 1871. Theory of Political Economy. London:
Macmillan.
Knight, Frank H. 1931. Professor Fisher’s Interest Theory: A
Case in Point. Journal of Political Economy 39: 176–212.
Krader, Lawrence. 1975. The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources,
Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx. Assen,
Germany: Van Gorcum.
Levy, David, and Sandra Peart. 2002. The Secret History of the
Dismal Science: Eugenics and the Amoralization of Economics.
Library of Economics and Liberty.
http:www.econlib.org/Library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal6.
html.
Loury, Glenn C. 2002. The Anatomy of Racial Inequality.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marshall, Alfred. 1891. Principles of Economics. London and
New York: Macmillan.
Marx, Karl. 1991. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol.
3. Intro. Ernest Mandel. Trans. David Fernbach. London and
New York: Penguin Books.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1976. The German Ideology.
In The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Vol.
5, April 1845–April 1847. New York: International
Publishers; London: Lawrence & Wishart.
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Mason, Patrick Leon. 1999. Male Interracial Wage Differentials:
Competing Explanations. Cambridge Journal of Economics 23:
1–39.
Morton, Eric. 2002. Race and Racism in the Works of David
Hume. Journal on African Philosophy 1 (1).
http://www.africanphilosophy.com/vol1.1/morton.html.
Munro, John. 2004. Roots of Whiteness. Labour/Le Travail (54).
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/54/munro.
html.
Murray, Charles. 1984. Losing Ground, American Social Policy,
1950–1980. New York: Basic Books.
Pigou, Arthur. 1907. Social Improvement and Modern Biology.
Economic Journal 17 (3): 358–369.
Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press.
Sowell, Thomas. 1981. Markets and Minorities. New York: Basic
Books.
Stewart, James. 1997. NEA Presidential Address, 1994: Toward
Broader Involvement of Black Economists in Discussions of
Race and Public Policy: A Plea for a Reconceptualization of
Race and Power in Economic Theory. In African Americans
and Post-Industrial Labor Markets, ed. James Stewart, 15–38.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions.
Stewart, James, and Major Coleman. 2005. The Black Political
Economy Paradigm and the Dynamics of Racial Economic
Inequality. In African Americans in the U.S. Economy, eds.
Cecilia Conrad, John Whitehead, Patrick Mason, and James
Stewart, 118–129. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Wallace, A. R. 1864. The Origin of Human Races and the
Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of Natural
Selection. Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2:
158–170.
Williams, Eric. 1994. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press. (Orig. pub. 1944).
Williams, Walter E. 1982. The State against Blacks. New York:
New Press.
Zeman, Morton. 1955. A Quantitative Analysis of White-NonWhite Income Differentials in the United States in 1939.
Unpublished PhD diss., Department of Economics,
University of Chicago.
James B. Stewart
RACE AND EDUCATION
Race and education becomes a social issue when educational opportunities are differentially available to members of diverse racial groups within a society.
Educational discrimination has a variety of effects
that often lead to interracial conflict. Because education is
a major means of social mobility, discrimination in this
domain forces less-favored racial groups to occupy lowerstatus jobs and receive less income. Such results form a
vital component in a wider system of racial oppression—
16
as in the former apartheid policies of South Africa and
state-mandated segregation in the U.S. South. But educational segregation by race also operates to limit the life
chances of discriminated racial groups in nations without
such formal systems of oppression, such as Brazil. And in
countries where social class and race are highly intercorrelated, as throughout Latin America, racial segregation in
schools results directly from intense patterns of residential
segregation by class.
Racially segregated schools are the hallmark of racial
discrimination in education. Separate schools allow for
vastly fewer resources to be provided for the oppressed
race. Indeed, racially separate schools are so central to systems of racial oppression that they are tenaciously maintained in the face of efforts to end them. The protracted
and only partially successful efforts to end segregated
schools in the United States provide a striking illustration.
Public schools did not emerge in the U.S. South until
late in the nineteenth century, and these early schools
were for whites only. Black schools came later, after formal
state laws for racial segregation had been sanctioned in
1896 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Although the case involved segregated railroad seating, its
decision establishing the formula of “separate but equal”
was promptly applied by the white South to schools,
which became extremely separate and unequal.
It was fifty-eight years before the High Court overturned Plessy. By 1950, in two graduate education cases,
the meaning of “equal” went beyond mere parity in brickand-mortar terms to include such intangibles as faculty
reputation and general prestige. The decisions prepared
the ground for Brown v. Board of Education four years
later to hold separate facilities to be inherently unequal.
But implementing this unpopular decision has proven
difficult.
Critical to the acceptance of mandated social change
that runs counter to dominant public opinion is the perception of inevitability. The responses of the white South
to the varying firmness of the High Court’s rulings illustrate the point. With an uncompromising, nine-to-zero
decision in Brown, the Court in 1954 generated a strong
sense of inevitability. But in 1955 the Supreme Court
retreated in its implementation order to a vague “all deliberate speed” formula (Brown II). This formula returned the
enforcement of desegregation back to southern federal district courts without guidelines. Only when this weak order
undermined the sense of inevitability did southern politicians become uniformly defiant and prosegregationist
organizations gain momentum. Then the opposition
believed Brown could be effectively opposed. Brown II is
not solely responsible for the violent opposition that followed, but its vagueness contributed to the resistance by
eroding the strong sense of inevitability that had prevailed.
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Consequently, the region’s school desegregation did
not take hold until the federal courts lost patience
between 1968 and 1973 (Orfield and Eaton 1996). This
brief period saw court orders achieve sweeping gains—
especially in the recalcitrant South but also in the cities of
the North and West. By the 1970s the South had more
racial desegregation in its public schools than any other
region. But this process ended abruptly in 1974 when the
Supreme Court reversed direction. In Milliken v. Bradley
the Court by five to four struck down a metropolitan
solution ordered by a district court to remedy the intense
racial segregation of Detroit’s public schools. What made
this decision so regressive is that such remedies were the
only means available to desegregate the public schools of
many of the nation’s largest cities (Orfield and Eaton
1996; Pettigrew 1981). Moreover, segregation between
city and suburban districts is now by far the major component today in metropolitan school segregation
(Clotfelter 2004). Decisions of the High Court from
1974 into the twenty-first century continued this trend,
and allowed racial segregation of the public schools to
return not only in the South but also throughout much of
the United States.
Thus, Brown was largely reversed without the High
Court ever stating that it was overturning the famous
decision. By 2000 black children were more likely to be
attending majority-black schools than at any time since
the 1960s; 70 percent went to predominantly black
schools and 37 percent to schools with 90 percent or more
black students. The greatest retrogression during the
1990s occurred in the South, the region that had previously witnessed the greatest gains (Orfield 2001). And
Latino school children became more educationally segregated from white children than African American children
(Orfield and Eaton 1996).
Supporting this retreat from desegregated schools, the
sociologist James Coleman (1926–1995) claimed in a
highly publicized speech that urban interracial schools
were impossible to achieve because desegregation causes
massive “white flight.” Desegregation led, he claimed, to
whites fleeing to the suburbs and leaving minority concentrations in central city cores. This research had serious
weaknesses, and its policy recommendations ignored metropolitan solutions (Pettigrew 1981).
The “white flight” thesis is far more complex than
Coleman claimed (Pettigrew and Green 1976). Some
whites did move from large cities when school desegregation began, but this movement was neither universal nor
permanently damaging. Some cities without any school
desegregation also experienced widespread white suburbanization. Other cities experienced little such movement
at the time of desegregation. And where so-called “white
flight” to the suburbs did occur, it constituted a “hasten-
ing up” process; within a few years the loss was what
would have been expected without desegregation (Farley,
Richards, and Wurdock 1980).
But does school desegregation improve the life
chances of African Americans? From the 1970s to the
1990s, black high school completion rates rose sharply.
Although less than half finished high school at midcentury, by 2000 the figure approached that of white
Americans. During these same years, the mean difference
between black and white achievement test scores steadily
narrowed (Neisser 1998). White scores were improving,
but blacks who entered school during the late 1960s
showed especially strong gains—when extensive school
desegregation began. Mean racial differences in achievement tests were not eliminated, but they began to close.
However, these positive trends stalled and were even
reversed by the late 1990s once the federal courts allowed
resegregation. Yet these trends are only suggestive, because
other factors were also influential—notably, rising black
incomes and such effective national educational programs
as Head Start.
More to the point, did school desegregation expand
opportunities for African Americans in the long term? An
array of sociological studies tracked the products of desegregated schools in later life to find answers (Pettigrew
2004). With social class controlled, black children from
desegregated schools, when compared with black children
from segregated schools, are later more likely:
1. to attend and finish majority-white colleges;
2. to work with white coworkers and have better jobs;
3. to live in interracial neighborhoods;
4. to have somewhat higher incomes;
5. to have more white friends and contacts and more
positive attitudes toward whites.
Similarly, white products of desegregation have more
positive attitudes toward blacks than comparable whites
from segregated schools. In short, desegregated education
prepares black and white Americans for an interracial
world.
These positive lifetime effects of desegregation are
not limited to test score gains—more important is the fact
that desegregation enables African Americans to break
through the monopoly that white Americans have traditionally had on informational flows and institutional
access. Sociologists have identified several interrelated
processes underlying this phenomenon (Pettigrew 2004).
These processes mirror the harsh fact that life chances in
America flow through white-dominated institutions.
Desegregation involves interracial contact. Intergroup contact is one of social psychology’s best-established
theories. A comprehensive meta-analysis found that 95
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percent of 714 independent samples with 250,000 subjects show that intergroup contact reduces prejudice
(Pettigrew and Tropp 2006).
Desegregation teaches interracial interaction skills.
Given the nation’s racist past, neither black nor white
Americans are skilled in interracial interaction. The products of desegregated schools have the opportunity to learn
these skills. Their anxiety about such interaction is
reduced. This is highly useful for both blacks and whites,
for it contributes to their willingness to enter biracial environments and their acceptance in these situations.
Desegregation erodes avoidance learning. After long
facing discriminatory treatment, some black Americans
learn to avoid whites. But this reaction has negative consequences. It closes off for ghetto dwellers the better
opportunities that exist in the wider society. And, like all
avoidance learning, it keeps one from knowing when the
situation has changed. Desegregated schooling overcomes
such avoidance.
Desegregated blacks gain access to formerly all-white
social networks, such as those that share information
about colleges and jobs. This process does not require personal friendships: Weak interpersonal ties are the most
informative, because close friends are likely to possess the
same information (Granovetter 1983). Interracial schools
allow black students to gain access to these networks.
Thus, although it is not a popularly recognized fact,
the racial desegregation of America’s public schools has led
to positive outcomes. But the resegregation of the nation’s
schools in the twenty-first century threatens to reverse
these beneficial processes.
Although the racial scene in the United States has
many unique features, social research in other nations suggests that similar intergroup processes operate in schools
throughout the world. Additional research is needed, but
the separation of groups in schools and other societal
institutions, whether the groups are racial or not, appears
to have comparably negative effects. Indeed, in some
interracial nations such as Brazil, the deleterious effects of
separate education may be even greater than in the United
States. Educational differences between Brazilians of different skin colors explains much of the nation’s variation
in racial occupational inequality and its racial gap in
white-nonwhite mobility (Telles 2004).
In addition to thwarting beneficial intergroup contact, intergroup separation triggers a series of interlocking
processes that make group conflict more likely. Negative
stereotypes do not just persist but are magnified; distrust
cumulates; and misperceptions and awkwardness typify
the limited intergroup interaction that does take place.
The powerful majority comes in time to believe that segregated housing, low-skilled jobs, and constrained educational opportunities are justified, even “appropriate,” for
18
the minority. In short, racially segregated schools reproduce racial inequality. Intergroup schools have proven one
of the needed antidotes for combating these negative
processes—from Northern Ireland to South Africa.
Colorism; Cox, Oliver C.; Park, Robert E.;
Park School, The; Race; Race Relations; Racism;
Sociology
SEE ALSO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clotfelter, Charles T. 2004. After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of
School Desegregation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
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Thomas F. Pettigrew
RACE AND POLITICAL
SCIENCE
Although controversies surrounding race have arisen in a
variety of nations since at least the sixteenth century, it has
only been since the mid-twentieth century that these
I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F T H E S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , 2 N D E D I T I O N
Race and Political Science
issues have generated serious attention in the discipline of
political science. Beginning primarily in the aftermath of
such watershed events as the civil rights movement in the
United States, the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the
demise of the apartheid system in South Africa, political
scientists have slowly begun to focus on the impact of race
in politics. In particular, scholars have examined issues
such as the impact of racial group membership and racial
attitudes on public opinion and voting behavior, partisanship, and political incorporation.
The literature on race and politics is perhaps most
developed in the United States, where race plays a role in
the level of support garnered by black candidates. There is
little doubt that African Americans represent a small
percentage of elected officials nationwide and that selfidentified black candidates are rarely elected in majoritywhite political jurisdictions. It is not at all clear, however,
that blacks fare poorly among white voters because of
their race. Scholars have sought to get a better grasp on
this question by relying upon experimental designs as a
way of isolating the effects of candidate race. When white
voters are randomly assigned to experimental conditions wherein otherwise identical candidates differ only in
their racial background, some studies have found that
black candidates are evaluated less favorably relative to
white candidates.
Racial considerations do not just figure prominently
in biracial contests. Some political scientists argue that the
contemporary American party system is primarily based
on racial cleavages. According to this view, after the 1964
presidential contest pitting racial liberal Lyndon Johnson
(1908–1973) against racial conservative Barry Goldwater
(1909–1998), voters began to view the political parties as
primarily distinctive on matters of race. This view became
solidified with the War on Poverty, which seemed to link
the Democratic Party with the aspirations of racial
minorities. There is some support for this controversial
claim. Although African Americans have been part of the
Democratic coalition since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
(1882–1945) second term, blacks have supported
Democratic presidential candidates—and identified with
the party—by increasingly lopsided margins since the
mid-1960s. Many whites, on the other hand, are now
firmly attached to the Republican Party, and since the late
1960s have consistently supported Republican presidential candidates over their Democratic opponents.
Much of this “realignment” of partisan loyalties has
occurred in the American South. Although solidly
Democratic since the end of Reconstruction, the South
began to abandon the Democratic Party in the 1970s and
1980s. The political science literature has not reached
consensus as to whether this is primarily due to racial considerations. For example, some scholars would argue that
social issues such as abortion, gay rights, and prayer in the
schools are more important a